I've heard excellent things about Viigo, so I decided to give it a try to replace FreeRange (the free version maxes out at 10 feeds and has one minor issue with caching full feeds when I don't what it to).

However, I've had a few problems with Viigo that make me wonder what all the fuss is about.

The most significant one is that auto update doesn't appear to work very well. To be specific, it does auto update. However, it only updates some of the feeds. And within some feeds, it only gets some of the articles. If I manually "Update All," I get the same result: very little gets updated. Either a feed is missed or only a subset of the articles are retrieved. If I open the feed and "Update" only that feed, it brings in all the articles. So, I have to select each feed individually to get the full update.

This alone seems like a major problem. Am I the only one experiencing this?

My other problem is that I have a feed or two were I can't retrieve full articles. If I try, I get "Unable to fetch the full article. The publisher may have deleted the article. Please try again later. Too many redirections."

When I reporting this issue to Viigo, they told me that it was unlikely to be a valid feed and directed me to w3c.org's validator. To be specific, they simply sent me the FAQ text, verbatim. I tried the validator and it said the feed was good. I already knew that, since I get the feed. The problem is with the full article links. Which are also valid, by the way.

Anyone know what this error means? FreeRange has no problems with it. Neither does any other reader I've tried. This is the first time I've seen this, so it's exclusive to Viigo. Other than opening each item in the BB browser, anything I can do to fix?

I'm most likely going back to FreeRange and living with the 10 feed limit (the price for more feeds is high, since it's a yearly fee) and my one very minor issue. Otherwise, it's been fine.

As for Viigo, other than its ability to easily find and add feeds and its alert functionality, it seems to be a lesser product that FreeRange. Which makes me wonder why so many people love it. The fact that it has a major issue with updating feeds and cannot deal with certain feed's full articles means that it's got major problems that are halting my consideration of the product.

Please, someone, tell me that it isn't so... that there's a fix for the update problems and the full article problems.